...You can go your whole life collecting days, and none will outweigh the one you wish you had back.

Courage is confused with picking up arms and cowardness is confused with laying them down.

We all know how to be a child.

Instead, he would make death his final project, the center point of his days. Since everyone was going to die, he could be of great value, right? He could be research. A human textbook. Study me in my slow and patient demise. Watch what happens to me. Learn with me.

God sings, we hum along, and there are many melodies, but it's all one song - one same, wonderful, human song.

The basis of everything, of all knowledge, is the ability to read.

The story of my recent life.' I like that phrase. It makes more sense than 'the story of my life', because we get so many lives between birth and death. A life to be a child. A life to come of age. A life to wander, to settle, to fall in love, to parent, to test our promise, to realize our mortality- and in some lucky cases, to do something after that realization.